Important

We are remarkably good at explaining why we want things. The dress is beautiful. The restaurant is good. The bag is exceptionally made. Our taste is our own. Other people may be influenced by labels, status, scarcity, who is wearing what and who has been invited where, but we have simply arrived at our preferences through the careful and independent exercise of excellent judgment.

I don’t entirely believe this.

I spent nearly a decade in fashion, which is an excellent place to observe how quickly an object can become more than the object itself. It is also an excellent place to discover that you are no more immune to any of this than anyone else.

I like beautiful things. I like good hotels, good clothes and being seated at an excellent table. I have wanted the store order, the recognition and, yes, sometimes the bag. It would be slightly late in the day for me to develop a moral objection to nice things.

What interests me is how we decide which things are nice in the first place.

We like to think taste is personal. I just like it. Maybe. But by the time most of us decide we like something, quite a lot has already happened.

For nearly ten years, I often visited the factories in New York’s Garment District where my clothes were made. They were not glamorous places. There were fluorescent lights, freight elevators, enormous cutting tables and occasionally cats wandering around whose unofficial responsibility seemed to be preventing the rats from taking over the night shift.

These were not inexpensive clothes. One of my dresses would eventually retail for between $850 and $1,200, and many of the garments hanging beside mine would sell for that much or considerably more. I used some of the better factories in the Garment District, the same ones producing clothes for designers far more famous than I was.

But on the racks, none of that was particularly obvious. The labels had not gone in yet. There was no campaign, no celebrity, no prestigious store, no magazine explaining which dress you were supposed to want. A dress from a famous designer might be hanging six inches from one of mine, and for that brief period, they had to exist without their reputations.

They were expensive. They were beautifully made. But there, they were just clothes.

I loved seeing them that way. A dress had to survive on a deeply unfashionable question: Is it actually beautiful?

This was always fascinating to me. Two dresses that had been hanging a few feet apart could suddenly begin entirely different lives. One might be photographed, bought by an important store, worn by someone famous. Then someone else would see it. A customer would ask for it. A buyer who had passed on it six months earlier might suddenly reconsider.

The dress hadn’t changed very much. Everything around it had.

We do this constantly. We attach meaning to things and then become so accustomed to the meaning that we forget we put it there. A restaurant becomes important because certain people go there. Those people become important because they go to important places. Someone knows someone, someone gets invited somewhere, someone else mentions it over dinner for reasons that are apparently essential to the story. Eventually everyone is circulating everyone else’s importance like a currency whose underlying asset nobody has checked in years.

I wasn’t outside this system looking in. I wanted my clothes in the right stores. I wanted the right magazines to write about them. I wanted women people recognized to wear them. I knew perfectly well that recognition could change a business.

When Ikram in Chicago placed an order for my collection, I was thrilled. Ikram had the kind of authority in fashion that Barneys had once had. She had spent years looking at clothes and had an extraordinary eye. She could choose from thousands of things, and she chose mine. That meant something to me.

It also felt good to say Ikram carried my collection.

I could pretend otherwise, but then we would have a different essay.

The same was true of Albini, one of Europe’s great textile mills. I was invited by the owner of the textile mill into the showroom and was enormously proud to be there. What became a nearly ten-year relationship opened my eyes to what fabric could actually be. We developed custom fil coupés together. I learned to see the construction of a textile differently, to understand what could happen before a designer ever cut into it. That relationship made me better at what I did.

I also liked being invited.

I don’t see why one has to cancel out the other.

Then there was Barneys. Marina Larroudé, who was the VP, Fashion Director at the time, had seen my collection and appeared impressed. Our clothes are made from beautiful Italian fil coupé, a fabric with a three-dimensional quality that never quite translated in photographs. The look books were beautiful, but I always felt something was lost on the page. You really had to see—and touch—the fabric.

So when we sent the collection out to a small group of important buyers and industry people, I used some of the leftover fabric to make handkerchiefs, each monogrammed with the recipient’s initials. Marina received one and invited me to her office to show her the collection in person.

She was extremely chic, which I expected, but also warm, kind and remarkably personable. I felt at ease almost immediately. For a young independent designer, simply being invited into her office felt like a compliment. Then, during the meeting, she began introducing me to buyers from different departments and showing them the fabrics and the clothes.

I could hardly believe it. Barneys might actually place an order.

For an independent designer, this was a very big deal. I had spent years hoping for a moment like this.

A few weeks later, Marina left Barneys. Not long after that, the store announced it was shutting down.

So much for that.

There was no great lesson in it at the time. I was disappointed. But looking back, it seems almost too perfect an example of how the business actually worked. You could spend months making something, finally get it in front of the right person, have the right person like it—and then the right person could leave. Nothing about the clothes had changed. Only their importance had.

So much for that.

This happened in less dramatic ways all the time. I would approach smaller stores and hear, endlessly, That category is covered. It became one of those phrases I could practically hear before the buyer said it. Fashion had an impressive number of ways of saying no without ever actually saying no.

What struck me was how political the whole thing was—not political in the sinister backroom sense, but in the ordinary human sense. Who already carried you mattered. Who had written about you mattered. Who else wanted you mattered. Timing mattered. Budgets mattered. Relationships mattered. Whether a store already had something vaguely resembling what you made mattered. And somewhere in the middle of all of this was the actual dress, patiently waiting to be judged on its merits.

I wish I had understood some of this when I was starting out. I took every yes as evidence that I was getting somewhere and every no as evidence that perhaps I wasn’t. Neither was quite as meaningful as I thought. The work could be exactly the same on Tuesday as it had been on Monday. What changed was the room it entered.

If I could tell a young designer anything now, it would be not to give those rooms quite so much power. Listen. Learn everything you can. Know when the work needs to be better, because sometimes it does. But learn the difference between criticism that can make you better and somebody simply not wanting what you are making. They are not the same thing.

There will be people you are certain you need to impress. Some will love the work. Some won’t understand it. Some won’t look at it at all. And occasionally, someone you had built up enormously in your mind will turn out to be simply another person with an opinion.

Make the work better. Keep showing it. And don’t let someone else’s importance determine your own.

Fashion talks a great deal about having an eye. What I learned is that even very good eyes tend to glance around the room.

Everyone wanted something new, but new was much more appealing once somebody trustworthy had already said it was good. Stores asked where else you were carried. Press led to stores, stores led to more press, the right customer led to another customer. This was perfectly rational from a business standpoint and slightly absurd from every other one.

Everyone wants to discover something. Very few people want to discover it completely alone.

I began to notice the same thing on the other side of the transaction. We like to think our own taste arrives untouched by all of this. We simply know what we like. We aren’t influenced by names or scarcity or what other people have chosen. We just happen, through some remarkable coincidence, to like many of the things everyone else with excellent taste likes.

Hermès is where I become particularly skeptical.

I love Hermès. The quality is exceptional. I have bags I’ve carried for nearly twenty years, and they remain some of my favorites. I love the leather, the workmanship, the strange pleasure of something becoming better rather than worse with age. I am not preparing to make an argument that a Birkin is secretly a terrible handbag.

But when someone who has amassed a collection of Birkins and Kellys tells me she buys them only because of the quality, I find this difficult to believe.

Oh, please.

The quality is part of the pleasure. Of course it is. But so is everything that has gathered around the object: the history, the scarcity, the orange box, the difficulty of getting one and, yes, the fact that somebody across the room knows exactly what you’re carrying.

Why are we so reluctant to admit this?

We have developed a very elegant vocabulary for wanting expensive things. We appreciate craftsmanship. We buy investment pieces. We choose things that are timeless. All perfectly legitimate concepts, but also extremely useful ones. “I have a deep appreciation for craftsmanship” sounds considerably better than “I really wanted the bag.”

There is a fairly simple way to test this. Make the same Birkin with the same leather, the same construction, the same stitching and the same extraordinary workmanship. Remove Hermès. Remove the orange box, the waiting list, the history and the possibility of recognition. Give it a name nobody has ever heard before.

Then put it in a store.

I’d genuinely like to see what happens.

Not because I think nobody would buy it. Someone would. There are people with an extraordinary appreciation for leather goods.

I just don’t think there would be a waiting list.

Fashion has become especially clever at pretending status isn’t status. Quiet luxury may be my favorite example. At some point logos became embarrassing, so the logos disappeared. The prices did not.

Neither did the recognition.

The point simply became that not everyone would recognize what you were wearing. Only the right people would.

This was presented as understated.

Status hadn’t disappeared. It had learned better manners.

The same little games happen everywhere. We call a coat an investment even though it has never once paid a dividend. We say something is timeless when sometimes we mean we spent enough on it that we would very much like it to remain fashionable. We insist we don’t follow trends while somehow ending up in the same trouser width within eighteen months of one another.

And fashion loves the word authentic, which has always amused me. Very little in fashion reaches us entirely unattended. There is the stylist, photographer, publicist, editor, buyer, celebrity, gifting, placement and post, after which everyone is delighted by how organically something has taken off.

I don’t object to any of this. I participated in it. I enjoyed parts of it enormously.

What I object to, if anything, is the fiction that we’re above it.

We aren’t.

Taste doesn’t develop in isolation. It would be strange if it did. Someone teaches you something. Someone shows you something you hadn’t noticed. You see a woman wearing something beautifully and suddenly understand it. You travel. You read. You look. Your eye changes. Albini changed mine. That wasn’t manipulation. It was education.

The difficult part is knowing where education ends and permission begins.

Did I recognize something as good because I had learned enough to see it, or did I feel more comfortable liking it once someone whose judgment I trusted liked it first?

Probably both.

This is also why I don’t believe wanting recognition is some embarrassing character defect. I certainly wanted it. I wanted people to buy my clothes. I wanted Ikram to like them. I wanted Barneys to place the order. Now I write something and want people to read it.

Of course I do. Otherwise I could save a considerable amount of time and keep it on my laptop.

I want a reader to laugh. I want someone to tell me she hadn’t thought about something that way. I don’t even mind if someone disagrees. A person who is irritated enough to disagree has at least been paying attention.

We want evidence that something we made reached another person. I don’t think there is anything especially profound or pathetic about that. It is one of the reasons we make things.

The problem is that recognition is wonderfully persuasive. Once somebody important likes the thing, other people look more closely. Sometimes they discover that the thing really is good. Sometimes they discover that they would very much like to be the sort of person who already knew it was good.

I spent nearly ten years watching this happen to clothes, including my own.

Some very good things were recognized. Some very good things weren’t. Some mediocre things did extremely well. Some brilliant people had terrible timing. Some less brilliant people had excellent timing. Buyers had budgets. Editors had advertisers. Stores had customers. Designers had investors. Everyone had relationships. And everybody, including the people supposedly deciding what mattered, was paying attention to what everyone else thought mattered.

But nothing travels through the world alone.

It travels with a name, a price, a photograph, a store, a reputation, a story and the particular tastes of the moment.

Sometimes those things help us see what was good in the first place.

Sometimes they simply tell us where to look.

None of this has cured me of anything. If Barneys somehow returned from the dead tomorrow and asked for a collection, I would be delighted.

I would ask where to ship.

Knowing why we want something, it turns out, does very little to stop us from wanting it.